Today, portable media devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or hand-held music players, are battery powered and include various user interface components. Conventionally, portable media devices use buttons, dials or touchpads together with graphical user interfaces to control the media devices, including navigating through media items resident on (or accessible to) the media devices, selecting media items to be played, and/or setting user preferences for use by the media devices. These portable media devices continue to get smaller and more portable. At the same time, the functionality supported by portable media devices is increasing. Consequently, as portable media devices get smaller while supporting robust functionality, there are increasing difficulties in providing adequate user interfaces for the portable media devices.
In order to achieve portability, many portable music players use minimalist displays that allow user access to the music via simple graphical user interfaces. The displays are not always well-lit, and may not be navigable in the dark, and furthermore illuminating the displays is a drain on battery power. Also, the user may be in certain situations (e.g., driving a car) where it is not convenient or appropriate to look at the display, or may have a physical disability that makes visual navigation impossible. Additionally, many people may simply find the displays too small and inconvenient to use on a regular basis. Recently, portable music players have been made highly portable and may not even include a display for presenting a graphical user interface. Hence, it has become important for portable music players to provide user-friendly interfaces that enable user interaction without reliance on graphical user interfaces.
In addition, while it is common to download media items, such as audio files (e.g., music), to personal media players, the media items being downloaded are fixed. Unlike radio stations, personal media players do not operate to allow mixing of additional audio while playing audio from the audio files.
Accordingly, there are continuing efforts to further improve the user experience with respect to media players.